Posted
by
Soulskillon Wednesday July 25, 2012 @01:52PM
from the you-got-your-mobile-OS-in-my-desktop-OS dept.

John Siracusa at Ars Technica has published a lengthy and detailed review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. (Lengthy enough that the review garnered a review of its own.) Siracusa methodically goes through all of the changes in the new version, covering everything from the minor new features to the overarching goals. Quoting:
"Despite the oft-cited prediction that Mac will eventually be subsumed by iOS, that's not what's happening here. Apple is determined to bring the benefits of iOS to the Mac, but it's equally determined to do so in a way that preserves the strengths of the Mac platform. Where we Mac nerds go wrong is in mistaking traditions for strengths. Loss aversion is alive and well in the Mac community; with each 'feature' removed and each decision point eliminated from our favorite OS, our tendency is to focus heavily on what's been lost, sometimes blinding ourselves to the gains. But the larger problem is that losses and gains are context-dependent. A person who never uses a feature will not miss it when it's gone. We all pay lip service to the idea that most users never change the default settings in software, but we rarely follow this through to its logical conclusion. The fact is, we are not the center of the market, and haven't been for a long time. Three decades ago, the personal computer industry was built on the backs of technology enthusiasts. Every product, every ad was created to please us. No longer. Technology must now work for everyone, not just 'computing enthusiasts.'"
A somewhat briefer review is available at ComputerWorld, and there's a quick one from John Gruber.

> Nobody has enough time to maintain forks of everything they use, never mind the people who don't even have the knowhow.

The point is that we usually don't have to. Unless you really are a unique snowflake, you aren't the only one being abandoned. In the case of GNOME going nuts there were lots of options and more directly on point a lot of pissed off former users creating offshoot replacement projects. Most of those will fail but it doesn't matter because it will be because a couple will succeed and attract in attracting the majority of the outcast former GNOME users. You don't HAVE to create everything yourself, from scratch. You can even take the last 'good' version of a software line that goes off the deep end and use that as a starting point.

If you don't like MIcrosoft or Apple's new direction you have fewer options. You can suck it up, switch operating systems or start a cleanroom cloning effort of the entire stack from scratch. And look at ReactOS or Wine to see how impractical that last option has proven to be.

Neil_Brown recently came out with his new #40767049 comment response to Moblaster's comment. In a surpising move, it was available for immediate reading at the time of its announcement. While missing out on some of the features we've come to love about his line of comments, I find it a refreshing level of meta-commenting that hasn't been seen in a while. Whether it's worth refreshing the browser to read responses to his comment has yet to be seen. We'll have to give it some time out in the wild to really get a feel for its general reception, but its +5 funny moderation does suggest that it will be read by many.

Or you could give them the one sentence worth of instructions it takes to disable Gayekeeper; or better yet, the one sentence it would take to tell them how to right-click and exempt your app only, so they can continue getting the anti-malware benefits of Gatekeeper with other apps, at least.

Or best of all, you could take the hour or so to download a free signing certificate from Apple and recompile your app... But that would actually be useful to your loyal customers who want to take advantage of Gatekeeper, and you wouldn't want that because how then would you grind your axe?

Apple blacklisted Gizmodo after they bought a stolen iPhone prototype a few years ago and refused to give it back before doing a full disassemble and report on every little detail. Since then, they've been left as the only major blog or news outlet that can't do firsthand reporting on the keynotes and product announcements, which has left them a little bitter. Small wonder that Gizmodo (Jesus Diaz in particular, of recent) has been saying all sorts of nonsense about Apple ever since.

Even if we ignore the chip on their shoulder, their reporting is shoddy and slimy, with them sometimes substantially altering their articles after they're posted. For instance, Briam Lam's account of returning the iPhone [gizmodo.com] makes it sound like they got a letter from Apple's legal team and they sent it right back. What you don't see in that version of his account is that Brian received a personal phone call from Steve Jobs, asking for it. Brian responded with an e-mail in which he refused to return it until Apple went on record [businessinsider.com], then altered the online version of the e-mail he sent to Apple's legal department, since the original version [edibleapple.com] made him look like an ass. The original reporting also contained a rosy accounting of a lot of those facts, but even that was later edited out in an effort to sweep it under the table as the original text of his correspondences leaked from other sources.

And that's far from being the only incident, though it is the most famous. RoosterTeeth lampooned Gizmodo [roosterteeth.com] and their "reporting" a few years back. They're a bunch of classless jackasses who treat facts as malleable ideas for their own benefit and cannot be trusted.

I can't tell if you're kidding or not. Can a 5-year old iMac even run games like Portal 2 or Diablo 3, both of which had native OSX releases?

How do you know what his gaming needs are? Maybe his "gaming needs" go no further than Pac Man and Tetris.

That said, the lowest end 20" mid 2007 iMac had an ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT in it, which is the minimum listed in the Portal 2 specs. Diablo 3 lists the ATI Radeon HD 2600 as the minimum required on the Mac; the HD 2600 Pro was the card in all the 24" mid 2007 iMacs[0]. So yes, a five year old iMac would meet the minimum requirements for the games you list. I'd assume this would require you to run with all of the lowest graphical settings -- you're not going to get the best possible textures and frame rates, but they can in fact run the games you mentioned.

You will likely need to do the same for a dozen dependencies before that works, since it won't compile against 12 year old libraries. And then some of those dependencies will need their own dependencies, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you end up effectively upgrading half of your Linux install that way, if you actually started with a 12 year old distro - I mean, we're talking Gtk 1.2 and Qt 2.x in that time frame.